One big problem with medicine today is that it's become so super-specialized. The brightest doctors spend years training in order to acquire mastery over a very small sub-domain of a particular speciality. This is why we now have pediatric neurologists and non-invasive cardiologists, each of whom specializes only in one tiny sliver of medicine. The advantage is that they're very good at what they do, which is great when the patient has a rare and complicated problem.
This is why these specialists are best confined to referral medical centers in a teaching university hospital, which attract patients with complex illnesses. However, because these specialists also practise in community hospitals, this leads to lots of harmful effects. The reason is that these specialists are only interested in zebras - the rare cases, which most doctors never see in a lifetime. This is because they like…
